Jim Bonner, vice president of geology for Englewood-based Ur-Energy said the uranium is at an average depth of 312 feet.

The company got control of several mines, including the 3,700-acre Shirley Basin site, when it acquired Pathfinder Mines Corp. in December.

Between the 1960s and 1990s, Pathfinder and its predecessors produced more than 71 million pounds of uranium.

“That’s been a pretty prolific district over the years, but I think getting back in there we can expect some of that same flavor to come through,” Bonner said. “There is still some leftover uranium from the ’80s and ’90s, and I think it’s going to turn out to be a nice deposit.”

Shirley Basin had been an open-pit mine until operations were suspended in the 1990s because of low uranium prices. Ur-Energy plans to mine using an in-situ recovery technique that dissolves the uranium in place and pumps it to the surface to be refined into yellowcake.

The company is currently mining in the Lost Creek district northwest of Rawlins, where it extracted 140,000 pounds of uranium between August and December 2013. Finished yellowcake was sold to nuclear power plants in the U.S.

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